Saturday, December 15, 2007

On abortion

OK, I’ll dive into this issue. Both sides are right.

Scientific advances have personalized the fetus, so that we no longer consider her or him in the womb merely a blob of tissue. But let’s have compassion for the stricken girl or woman unable to nurture the new life growing in her. It would be as wrong to destroy her life as the life in her womb.

Abortion may be murder (depending on when it's done), but it should not be criminalized because banning it does not save any babies—the rate of abortions remains as high in societies that ban abortion as in societies that don’t. But banning abortion kills more women, who use desperate measures to end their pregnancy.

Let’s focus on what we all want—reducing the number of abortions. That means increasing the availability of contraception, and that means supporting Planned Parenthood, which maybe more than any other organization reduces the number of abortions by providing birth control. A stance against abortion loses credibility if it includes a stance against Planned Parenthood.

Recently, Congress made a technical error in writing a new law, which made the price of birth control skyrocket almost 900 percent. Women who were paying $5 to $10 a month now have to pay $40 to $50—impossible for low-income women. If we really want to reduce the number of abortions, correcting this is the place to start.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Both sides are right? Won't you ever admit that the left is simply wrong on some issues?

Abortion should be criminalized precisely because it may be murder. We make many things illegal simply because they are hazardous to health; and we virtually always make things illegal if they are potentially deadly. Notice something doesn't have to be actually deadly before we ban it; only potentially deadly. So my first comment is that you are making a pointless distinction between something that may be murder or may be deadly and something that is so. In either case, that something probably should be banned.

My second point is that abortion IS murder, not just "may be". A unique human identity (at least in terms of DNA) is imprinted on an unborn child from the moment of conception. The unborn child is also not guilty of any crime. So, abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. It is murder by definition.

You say it all "depends on when it is done." But you know that the development of the fetus is so continuous that it is too difficult to find a point in the pregnancy (other than conception) when it is CLEAR that human life has begun, and before that point it has not yet begun. If we are not sure that it has NOT begun at a certain point, then perhaps it HAS begun, and then abortion should not be performed because it MIGHT be the killing of an innocent life that has already begun. Pro-choicers always like to ask the question,"How do you really know that life begins at conception?" But the question we should be asking is,"How do we know it doesn't?"

My third point is that we should avoid the fallacy that an act is not wrong simply because it's not murder. Even if abortion is not murder, even if the fetus is just pre-human material (blob of tissue), abortion is still wrong. It doesn't respect the human body of the developing child, even if that child is not yet a "person". We respect post-human material (a corpse) by giving it a proper burial, not by sucking it down into a sink as is done to embryos in abortion mills.

Thus, regardless of the case we consider, whether we consider abortion to be murder, or not, or maybe, I think abortion is still gravely immoral. If we think about it carefully, there is no excuse for abortion. If we take the pro-choice position to its logical conclusion, then it should be okay to legalize infanticide, which some radical pro-choicers already advocate.

But what if pregnant women have no other choice but to have an abortion? If we should have compassion for the woman stricken with pregnancy, then I suppose you would say that we should have compassion for single mothers who are struggling to take care of their children. However, we do not legalize infanticide and allow single mothers to kill their children if they think that will solve their problems.

"Compassion" for pregnant women and their problems is not the issue. Of course, we should have compassion. The issue is what is the best way to help them deal with their problems. The best way is the "good-est" way, which means it must be a good way, which means it must be a MORAL way, not just the easiest or most pragmatic way.

You say, "It would be as wrong to destroy her life as the life in her womb." Oh come on! Pregnancy is not as life threatening to the mother as abortion is to the unborn child.

Oh, and another thing, life in America is not so bad that any child has to be killed off. To say that it is better for an unborn child to be killed rather than born in a FIRST WORLD country is ridiculous.

Banning abortion kills more women? I don't think you have good information to back this up. Tens of millions of unborn children have been killed in the past few decades. There is no way that many women would have been killed if abortion would have been criminalized during that time. And I am not buying the argument that most of those tens of millions were not yet human persons.

Of course banning abortion saves babies. Come on, let's be honest. We know that many babies would have been saved if abortion was not legalized. The abortion rate has more to do with its legality than it has to do with the availability of contraception and things like that.

As for contraception, it has already been made so nauseatingly available. Yet we still have plenty of abortions. Even from a purely practical standpoint, independent of any issues of morality, it seems the only way we can reduce the number of abortions is by criminalizing it and by NOT supporting Planned Parenthood. PP is an evil institution. I'm sure PP has performed abortions that even you would consider murder. Think carefully about what you are doing: You are supporting murderers!

So your arguments make no sense. I can't believe that you really believe we can reduce abortion by permitting it. I bet you don't really care about reducing abortions anyway. You only care about not letting social conservatives be right about anything.

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